Knowledge Base

We suggest you give as many network adapters to the virtual machines as possible. Doing so will help ensure that the majority of your network resources will be devoted to the virtual machines. As the console operating system is intended primarily as a management interface, you should minimize resources allocated to the console operating system. You will most likely want to allocate at least one Ethernet device to the console operating system so that you can manage your ESX Server machine remotely.

In the event that you want one or more virtual machines to use an Ethernet adapter owned by the console operating system, you can use bridged networking. With bridged networking, a virtual machine can access the Ethernet cards owned by the console operating system. However, bridged networking requires that the console operating system service requests sent on its Ethernet card, resulting in slower performance. You also may want to avoid using bridged networking in order to maintain a firewall between your virtual machines and the console operating system.

In the likely event that you have fewer Ethernet devices than virtual machines, you can share VMkernel Ethernet adapters between the virtual machines with little performance penalty.

See the README file for more information about how you can manage your network settings.